12 Silly Things People Believe About Computers

Some users are like little children or small animals: they require constant supervision, hand holding and care, else they may end up hurting themselves or damaging company property. Who are these users? Well, typically they are white collar office workers who have been using computers as their primary work tool for at least a decade or more, and yet still have absolutely no clue how to operate them or how they work. In other words, the people who fill up the help desk queue with tickets every single day of your life.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people in the business world not only do not know how to do basic day-to-day computing, but have absolutely no idea how computers and internet work in general. To them, computers are mysterious black boxes with magic inside, and networks are strange, almost supernatural hyperspace portals between computers that allow magic, gnomes and unicorns to pass through and make things happen on the internet. They hold strange, almost superstitious beliefs about technology that have no grounding in reality whatsoever. Today I would like to talk about these common myths and misconceptions.

#1: Hacking is magic

Mostly due to portrayal of hacking in popular culture, most people who work with technology every day have very distorted view of computer security. I think the conceptual model they are working from is that computers have these magical barriers (firewalls) that protect them from unspecified dangers, but which can be circumvented by typing really fast without using the space bar. In essence, no security system is safe and a skillful hacker can break into just about any computer in less than five minutes if he is good enough.

More in Tux Machines

RIP Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Linux Journal has learned fellow journalist and long-time voice of the Linux community Robin "Roblimo" Miller has passed away. Miller was perhaps best known by the community for his roll as Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008. He went on to write and do video interviews for FOSS Force, penned articles for several publications, and authored three books, The Online Rules of Successful Companies, Point & Click Linux!, and Point & Click OpenOffice.org, all published by Prentice Hall.

The open source, Linux based “AsteroidOS” alternative to Wear OS arrives in a stable 1.0 release, and Block spins off some of its Android smartwatch stack as an open source OpenWatch Project.
The AsteroidOS project has released version 1.0 of its open source, Linux-based smartwatch distribution. Designed for after-market installation on “Wear OS by Google” (formerly Android Wear) watches, AsteroidOS can now be dual booted on seven different models. The release follows the late March announcement of an OpenWatch Project for building Android based open source custom ROMs on Wear OS watches.

Purism has published their nearly final specifications on their limited-run Librem 5 Dev Kit. The cutoff for ordering a developer kit is next week as they are placing their hardware order and planning on only this single, limited run of the developer kit prior to the phones becoming available next year.
Their deadline for ordering a developer kit is the end of the month and the kit price has raised to $399 USD. In the process, Purism believes they are still on track for their January 2019 for coming up with having the phone's actual hardware ready.

Red Hat News

Today, Pure Storage is excited to announce Pure Service Orchestrator. It is now possible to deliver container storage-as-a-service to empower your developers to build and deploy scale-out, microservices applications. The agility that your developers expect they could only get from the public cloud is now possible, on premise!
In this blog, we’ll discuss why the adoption of containers is exploding, how the the lack of persistent storage threatens to slow adoption, and why a newer, smarter approach to storage delivery for containerized application environments is needed.

With a Red Hat subscription, you get the latest enterprise-ready software, expert knowledge, product security and technical support from trusted engineers making software the open source way. Red Hat Support makes sure our enterprise technology works in your environment, and helps you minimize the impact to your business if an issue occurs. If you need to open a support case, it will be routed to engineers that are specialized in the product that you use, so your issue can be efficiently resolved by experts.

Red Hat has introduced Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud, an integrated solution for customers seeking to co-locate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments. The new offering combines Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 in a single user experience, supported by a common lifecycle for greater operational and organizational efficiency.

The firm recently celebrated 25 years in business, and according to Miles, Red Hat is as strong as ever. Four years into his tenure at the company here in the Middle East, he has been “pleasantly surprised” and “very impressed” that regional organisations are already pursuing strong strategies in open source.

Red Hat launched a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform for telcos and enterprises that combines OpenStack compute with its Ceph storage.
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud is an open, integrated platform for customers seeking to co-locate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments.
Announced Tuesday at the OpenStack Summit, the new platform blends Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 into a single user experience for hyperconvergence in the hybrid cloud. Red Hat said it was the biggest contributor to both open source projects.

Debian and Derivatives

More demos of vnlog and feedgnuplot usage! This is pretty pointless, but should be a decent demo of the tools at least. This is a demo, not documentation; so for usage details consult the normal docs.
Each Wednesday night I join a group bike ride. This is an organized affair, and each week an email precedes the ride, very roughly describing the route. The two organizers alternate leading the ride each week, and consequently the emails alternate also. I was getting the feeling that some of the announcements show up in my mailbxo more punctually than others, and after a recent 20-minutes-before-the ride email, I decided this just had to be quantified.
The emails all go to a google-group email. The google-groups people are a wheel-reinventing bunch, so talking to the archive can't be done with normal tools (NNTP? mbox files? No?). A brief search revealed somebody's home-grown tool to programmatically grab the archive:

To whom it may concern, this is my report over the first few weeks of gsoc under the umbrella of the Debian project. I’m writing this on my way back from the minidebconf in Hamburg, which was a nice experience, maybe there will be another post about that ;)
So, the goal of my GSOC project is to design and implement a new SSO solution for Debian. But that only touches one part of the projects deliveries. As you can read in the description Alexander Wirth originally posted in the Debian Wiki, the project consists of two parts, where the first one is the design and coding of a new backend and self-service interface for Debian guest users (this includes the accounts of Debian Maintainers).

Compared to its previous releases, Debian-based Parrot 4.0 ethical hacking distro has arrived with a lot more changes. The development team has called it an important milestone in the history of the project.

Kubuntu 18.04 LTS has been released and we take it for a test drive in this detailed review of Kubuntu 18.04.

Latest News

How CERN Is Using Linux and Open Source

CERN really needs no introduction. Among other things, the European Organization for Nuclear Research created the World Wide Web and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, which was used in discovery of the Higgs boson. Tim Bell, who is responsible for the organization’s IT Operating Systems and Infrastructure group, says the goal of his team is “to provide the compute facility for 13,000 physicists around the world to analyze those collisions, understand what the universe is made of and how it works.”

WhiteSource Rolls Out New Open Source Security Detector

WhiteSource on Tuesday launched its next-generation software composition analysis (SCA) technology, dubbed "Effective Usage Analysis," with the promise that it can reduce open source vulnerability alerts by 70 percent.
The newly developed technology provides details beyond which components are present in the application. It provides actionable insights into how components are being used. It also evaluates their impact on the security of the application.
The new solution shows which vulnerabilities are effective. For instance, it can identify which vulnerabilities get calls from the proprietary code.

Announcing “e Foundation” for eelo

I’m pleased to announce that a non-profit organization has been incorporated to support the project: e Foundation.
“e Foundation” will host core eelo assets and fuel the development of eelo software.
This non-profit organization will be able to receive private and public grants, as well as donations from individuals, from anywhere in the world. We’re also working to add a legal way so that donations could benefit from tax cuts, as it’s often possible when donating to “in the public interest” organizations.
As soon as a bank account will be ready for “e Foundation”, we will move there all donations and our “in demand” crowdfunding campaign.